The Fastest Way to Eliminate Bed Bugs

The discovery of bed bugs in your home or commercial building is enough to make you want to run for the door, and your concerns are completely founded.

Bed bugs feed on human hosts, and their bites can trigger serious allergic reactions in sensitive individuals. Their population also grows rapidly, and even one tiny bug brought back from vacation in your suitcase can turn into thousands lurking throughout your home.

It’s Time to Take Action

Once you’ve identified the signs of bed bugs such as sighting an actual insect or finding black spots along your walls or bedding, you know that you must take action. You also don’t want to waste time using ineffective methods such as over-the-counter sprays that could cause the problem to spread, as well as endangering your family and pets with strong and possibly dangerous chemicals.

Today, the most effective and fastest way to bed bug elimination is to use a heat treatment that gets rid of the problem at its source without having adverse effects on your property or health.

How Heat Treatment Works So Fast

Bed bugs are extremely sensitive to the temperatures in their environment, and the right conditions help them to mature and reproduce rapidly. Knowing this, pest control companies use their temperature sensitivity against them by heating up an infested room to temperatures that they cannot withstand.

For a typical bed bug heat treatment, the air in an infested area is heated with special equipment until it reaches between 135 and 150 degrees Fahrenheit.

On average, bed bugs and their eggs die immediately once the temperature reaches 122 degrees Fahrenheit, and the temperature is kept within this range for several hours to make sure that every insect and the eggs are affected.

Plan to Be Away for Several Hours

Since these temperatures are hotter than humans and animals can withstand, you will need to plan for your family and pets to be out of your home during the duration of the treatment. However, everything will be back to normal when you return, and your belongings should still be in their normal condition.

You have the option of using heat to treat a single room or your entire home, which gives you the ultimate flexibility for eliminating hard-to-treat infestations.

Making Sure No One Bed Bug Remains

While heat immediately kills bed bugs and their eggs, you may worry about what could happen if even one tiny bug remains. Depending upon how the infestation began in the first place, you may also be concerned about bringing new bugs home.

For instance, frequent travelers, volunteers and anyone living in a multifamily building such as an apartment are all at risk for reinfestations after the original problem is cleared.

Creating a Barrier

A product called Apprehend is an optional additional treatment used by pest control companies to create a barrier around the perimeter of areas where bed bugs tend to live. The odorless formula is made up of special oils that contain spores for a fungal disease that causes them to die within three to ten days.

Unlike other types of chemical treatments, this option is completely safe since the active ingredient does not affect humans or pets. However, the bed bugs spread the disease to each other through close contact, making it even more effective for eliminating their populations. (See also: 6 Tips to Keep Your Home Clean During the Holiday Season)

Combined Treatment for Complete Elimination

The best way to address a bed bug problem is with a two-prong approach. With the heat treatment you get instant gratification, and by adding Apprehend as a barrier you know that all the bugs will be eliminated. You can be confident that your bed bug problem is gone.

Your pest-free environment will stay that way too since the barrier product stays active for approximately three months. For peace of mind, you can also have it reapplied at planned intervals so that you can continue to prevent infestations from taking hold.

While you may never quite get over the feeling you get when you see a bed bug, you don’t have to suffer long when you know how to eliminate an infestation right away.

Stacey Smith is a freelance health writer. She is passionate to write about women’s health, dental health, diabetes, endocrinology and nutrition and provide in-depth features on the latest in health news for medical clinics and health magazines.

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